Hackers claim leaked Rosstat data show 394,000 to 450,000 Russian war deaths

What the hackers claim

Two hacker groups, Belarusian Cyberpartisans and Silent Crow, say data from the internal Demography database of Russia's Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) points to between 394,000 and 450,000 deaths in Russian forces since the invasion of Ukraine began. The records they describe are death certificates registered between February 2022 and August 2026. Belarusian Cyberpartisans, an anonymous group of activist hackers opposed to the regime of Aleksandr Lukashenko, counts at least 393,881 deaths, using only records that explicitly name military operations as the cause of death. Silent Crow gives a higher figure of up to 450,100, using a wider method that also counts servicemen who died outside combat and some deaths where no cause was recorded.

Belarusian Cyberpartisans (at least)393,881

Silent Crow (up to)450,100

Belarusian Cyberpartisans (at least)

393881 deaths

Silent Crow (up to)

450100 deaths

Data from the article text

How the hackers say they got in

The hackers say they entered the Rosstat network about six months before launching the attack. During that period they say they systematically collected internal documents and other information. They then targeted the agency's IT infrastructure during the night of 31 October to 1 November. Rosstat has acknowledged that its systems were targeted by cyberattacks between 29 October and 1 November, but it denies that its databases were compromised or that any information was leaked. The agency later reported disruptions to some of its services and extended the deadlines for submitting certain statistical data.

What remains unverified

Kyiv Independent, which reported the claims, said it could not immediately verify the authenticity of the leaked data or the groups' estimates of the number of dead. The casualty figures published by the hackers have not been independently checked. The articles offer one point of scale: the Ukrainian open-source mapping project DeepState estimates that Russia has taken control of about 73,000 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022. The gap between the two hacker estimates comes down to methodology rather than to different source records, since both groups cite the same database.

The limits of the data

The claimed totals cover death certificates registered up to August 2026, so they describe losses across the whole period of the war to that date rather than a single month. Because the Cyberpartisans' count is limited to deaths explicitly attributed to military operations, it is the narrower of the two estimates. Silent Crow's count includes deaths that were not caused by fighting and records without a stated cause, which makes its figure the broader one. Both groups describe the dead as people who fought for Russia or had other links to the war. The articles do not show the database records themselves, so readers cannot yet check how the figures were compiled.